Is Vixra a crackpot site or an alternative ?

Dear Friends,
I want people to give their views criticise and improve what I place here.
Vixra is an open-access journal created to circumvent the issue of endorsement on arXiv. It does not have endorsement issues and is open to all. The reasons arXiv puts, is that it recieves more than million papers every year, is it possible? check the page of endorsement policy of arXiv. If we see arXiv, then it is equally filled with crackpot papers which never get published in peer-reviewed journals. I am even sorry to say that I been working with a person who has more than 100 papers stuck in arXiv since years, and is a professor of a very famous institute worldwide. Moreover many big journals do not even accept papers if they are published in open-access, the reason is not that they might be low quality, but it reduces their chance to make money from subscribing to their journal,.

Over 30% of papers on viXra get published in peer-reviewed good journals like PRD.

I am not in favour of viXra.Comparing them, we see that if arXiv promises a semi-guaranteed approach viXra opens doors for new and critical ideas but both of them cannot guarantee entry of baseless papers.

I personally feel arXiv should relax their endorsement policy a bit or modify for good, and divide their journal to better manage it, if they recieve a huge amount of papers to be published, then there would be no place for wrong papers being published.

Vixra is the best proof that a rigoros restriction to science is necessary for such services as the arXiv. The same holds true for a forum like this one. Otherwise you have everything full of crackpot nonsense. With the WWW we don't have the problem to get information but to get some "filter" for good-quality information, and arXiv with its policy is a great example that such filters work, whlie viXra shows what happens without such filters.

I agree with your point in some way Vanhees71. But is'nt the policy of finding an endorser who has published 4 papers in 5 years on same topic example math-phys ( not even same subject) eligible to endorse, a huge restriction. Today the field of science has become so narrowed down to a vast amount of different subfields that a person working on Quantum Physics itself does not know many a times what is going on in the same subject. If an independent researcher asks for an endorsement, the first question being asked is affiliation, designation rather than a critical read of the work.

Endorsement in that scenario becomes a drawback. What is needed is just make more good people eligible to endorse. I have seen a good amount of famous scientists not able to endorse on arXiv even when they have papers in peer-reviewed journals and they can be trusted ! Many endorsers are the ones who unnecessarily publish on arXiv to keep their numbers up !

I have a paper submitted on viXra and I have worked independently. I had issues getting endorsement, because as usual no one was ready to endorse someone whose subfield they are not working on, or had an issue of supporting somebody who has criticized some very well known researchers work. I had even presented my work at HRI, which is known very well in the world for Theoretical Physics. My work is genuine and serious, like many others who publish on viXra( I do accept that it also has a good amount of baseless work, but even arXiv has it). There are issues with both the journals, there should be a way out.

Even S.N. Bose was rejected for his theory of Bosons for Quantum Statistics. Please think with an open mind. Formalities are for us we are not for formalities.

I agree with your point in some way Vanhees71. But is'nt the policy of finding an endorser who has published 4 papers in 5 years on same topic example math-phys ( not even same subject) eligible to endorse, a huge restriction. Today the field of science has become so narrowed down to a vast amount of different subfields that a person working on Quantum Physics itself does not know many a times what is going on in the same subject.

This is a statement that has no evidence to back it up.

If someone is working on "Quantum physics", he/she SHOULD know what is going on in the SAME subject! That is why we have journals! That is why we have conferences! That is why we make graduate students first stating out in a particular area to spend time doing literature search! You HAVE to know what is the state of the field you are working in, or else you are doing it blindly! How else can you know if something has already been discovered, or disproved, etc?

As far as I can tell, only a crackpot works in an area and is completely clueless of what is going on in that same area!

ArXiv started out without any restrictions. The FACT that they had to put some level of restrictions meant that they were getting way too many garbage! People who couldn't work themselves out of a paper bag were posting stuff that claimed to solve the Grand Unified Theory!

We do not allow references to Vixra. We even limit references to ArXiv to only certain areas of physics that extensively used ArXiv in their everyday communications.

We get this type of issue every now and then, and I always shake my head whenever I see one. It is as if some people no longer care about the quality of something, and that any effort to put some measure of quality control has been deemed to be unnecessary, all without any kind of valid evidence to support such an argument. As far as I'm aware of, the restrictions put on by ArXiv has NOT stopped, or stunted, any kind of valid physics out there.

Even S.N. Bose was rejected for his theory of Bosons for Quantum Statistics. Please think with an open mind. Formalities are for us we are not for formalities.

If Bose sent his paper in to ArXiv, he would have gotten in simply based on the fact that he was at an educational institution.

But we are comparing apples and oranges here. The situation is now completely different! Bose had very few avenues to submit his work. I can easily point out my argument to the fact that the science are now even MORE open to "crazy" ideas:

It is sad that your goal here is to get onto ArXiv, whereas for most legitimate scientists, the goal is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal. You need NO endorsement for that. All you need now is a legitimate work that has an impact. Bose's work was published in one of these. So why aren't you aiming for that, rather than wasting time about not being able to get onto ArXiv?

As I understand it arxiv is NOT a journal. It's a pre-print server. The basic idea is that works that are in progress can be uploaded so that others in the community can see what's being worked on without the time lag of the peer review process. It also offers an avenue to provide open access to academic work.

Publishing is not about "trust" in academia. It's about peer review. You can be a published scientist doing honest work, but still not get a paper accepted to a journal for a number or reasons. Even good, honest scientists make mistakes, or use methodology that is not sufficient to warrant the conclusions they draw, or struggle to adequately articulate their methods, or are not aware of other work in the field that should be cited (edit: I agree with what ZapperZ says above, my point here is that peer review is necessary even for well-intentioned scientists).

I personally feel arXiv should relax their endorsement policy a bit or modify for good, and divide their journal to better manage it, if they recieve a huge amount of papers to be published, then there would be no place for wrong papers being published.

To emphasize what Choppy said, I will point out that even Einstein would have learned something, and made one of his discovery so much quicker, had he bothered to listen to the comments made by the referee of the Physical Review:

First, there is no doubt that Vixra is filled with crackpottery. Where else in the scientific literature can you find Jesus Christ as an author? That doesn't mean everything in it is wrong - even a stopped clock is right twice a day - but there's a ton of crackpot nonsense there, and it's a bad idea to take a serious paper and post it there. As an analogy, McDonald's sells millions of hamburgers with a clown as its spokesperson. That doesn't mean I should use a clown to promote my paper.

Second, the bar for arXiv is set really, really low. You need to find one person active in your field who will say that your paper is not complete rubbish. Somehow, when this happens, its never the fault of the paper.

Next, I doubt very much that 30% of the papers have gone to journals of the quality of PRD. Perhaps 30% have gone to journals, including crackpot journals, vanity journals, and just plain low-quality journals, but I simply don't believe that 30% go top PRD-quality journals. Just look at article abstracts.

The "Bose was rejected too" argument is a variation of "They laughed at the Wright Brothers", which is easily countered by "They laughed at Laurel and Hardy". If your paper was rejected, it does not mean it's of the same quality as Bose's. Indeed, Bose did exactly the right thing - found another journal, and two months later it was in print.

Sure, there is no question about it: Without peer review science is lost! After all peer review is the quality control of all scientific work. On the other hand the arXiv is very important nowadays too, for exactly the reasons Choppy has given: You can put your work there to communicate it without delay with everybody else in your scientific community. You get some response before the review. Usually we send our stuff to the arXiv first and wait some days for response from the community. Mostly you get a response pointing out papers you have not been aware before and thus you have not cited. Then usually one carefully reads the publication in question and often you put the reference in before sending it to a journal.

On the other hand the arXiv cannot be completely free to post anything anybody likes to put there. Otherwise it wouldn't be useful anymore, because it would be swamped by crackpotery. If you are at a respected affiliation there's no problem to post your work, but it's subject to some control, and if it is crackpotery, it's taken away from the arXiv to keep it useful for its users. There's plenty of space in the WWW where everybody can put up whatever he/she likes, but one must also have some places, where some quality control is used to keep it trustworthy. The same holds true for great stuff like Wikipedia, which is pretty restrictive too, but without this it by far wouldn't be so valuable a source as it is today.

Last but not least the same holds true for forums like this. A sad example is the usenet. The German physics newsgroup is unusable for some years now, and in the English-speaking usenet only the moderated groups are still useful. I'm pretty sure that this forum would become unusable very quickly without the very good work the moderators do behind the scenes!

Staff: Mentor

As I understand it arxiv is NOT a journal. It's a pre-print server. The basic idea is that works that are in progress can be uploaded so that others in the community can see what's being worked on without the time lag of the peer review process.

Before arXiv existed, physicists sent (or rather, they had their departmental secretaries send) photocopies of drafts of their papers to universities and insitututes where others worked in the same field. These preprints were commonly made available for browsing and circulation among faculty members, as I've described in an earlier post. They also included conference talks, lecture notes, etc., which were not actually being prepared for publication, but were nevertheless considered useful.

Preprints were an important part of scientific communication, but nobody viewed them as a substitute for formal publication with peer review.

Also, where did some of you get the idea that Bose's contribution to statistical physics was rejected? He has sent his manuscript to Einstein, who then translated it and then published it for Bose (and under Bose's name of course) in "Zeitschrift für Physik", a very respected journal (which nowadays is succeeded by the different sections of the European Phyaicsl Journal). Later on Einstein extended the idea from its application to photon statistics to particle statistics, predicting the possible existence of Bose-Einstein Condensates, which took then about 70 years to be realized in the lab. You really cannot say that Bose's contribution got somehow rejected or neglected.

A bit more pityful was Pascual Jordan with his discovery of what we know as Fermi-Dirac statistics. He gave a corresponding manuscript to Max Born, his academic teacher and mentor at the time, to read it before sending it to an appropriate journal. Unfortunately Born was just on his way to a trip to the US and then forgot the manuscript in his suitcase. That's why not Jordan has become the discoverer of Fermi-Dirac statistics but Fermi and Dirac (who'd have guessed that ;-)). This couldn't happen today, because then Jordan would have sent his manuscript to the arXiv, and at least it would have a time stamp ensuring his priority of the discovery.

I read titles and abstracts (as well as at least glancing at the figures) for all new submissions to my area of physics (condensed matter theory) each morning. If arXiv did not have some level of endorsement/peer review, this would be a waste of my time. But because I have some baseline expectation of quality, this has proven to be a worthwhile activity. Suffice to say, I do not do the same for viXra. In fact, I have never even looked at viXra.

Suffice to say, I do not do the same for viXra. In fact, I have never even looked at viXra.

I really dont understand why people on sites like viXra are always after some grand unified theory or QFT result. If they would of focused on low hanging fruits of newer fields with less people working on it they might actually have some success (there are all kinds of results in complex networks or machine learning etc which a laymen could have contributed in). It seems like a better use of time than a scientific hail mary on a crowded field.

I don't think the arXiv is hard to use at all. I was able to register quite quickly to post my paper even though I am an undergrad. Although it may be irrelevant in this case as my three professor coauthors are all leaders in the field.